Commodities That Speak Fuck You up Biatch! AT: Marxism/Cap K
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Commodities That Speak Fuck You Up Biatch! AT: Marxism/Cap K Moten 2003 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 7-12]
In Caribbean Discourse Edouard Glissant writes: From the outset (that is from the moment Creole is forged as a medium of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8 Lingering with Glissant’s formulations produces certain insights. The first is that the temporal condensation and acceleration of the trajectory of black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that the animative materiality—the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force— of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being (which would necessarily bear and be irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity). One of the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on such philosophy, is that those manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R. James described can never be understood simply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the present is bound up with what is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the commodity who speaks. Here is the relevant passage from volume 1 of Capital, at the end of the chapter on “The Commodity,” at the end of the section called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.”
But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one more example relating to the commodity-form itself. If commodities could speak they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist: “Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (i.e., usevalue) of man. Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.” So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen, nevertheless find that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to mind at this point the advice given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal? “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature.”9
The difficulty of this passage is partly due to its dual ventriloquizations. Marx produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumb commodities before he reproduces what he figures as the impossible speech of commodities magically given through the mouths of classical economists. The difficulty of the passage is intensified when Marx goes on to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances contradict one another but Marx comes down neither on the side of speech he produces nor on that of the speech of classical economists that he reproduces. Instead he traverses what he conceives of as the empty space between these formulations, that space being the impossible material substance of the commodity’s impossible speech. In this regard, what is at stake is not what the commodity says but that the commodity says or, more properly, that the commodity, in its inability to say, must be made to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commodity’s speech that Marx critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the fact nor in the possibility of such speech. Nevertheless, this critique of the idea of the commodity’s speech only becomes operative by way of a deconstruction of the specific meaning of those impossible or unreal propositions imposed upon the commodity from outside. The words Marx puts into the commodity’s mouth are these: “our use value . . . does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value,” where value equals exchange value. Marx has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only relate to one another as exchange-values, that this is proven by the necessarily social intercourse in which commodities might be said to discover themselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers herself, comes to know herself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having been embedded in a mode of sociality that is shaped by exchange. The words of the commodity that are spoken through the mouths of the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., use-value) are independent of the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say exchange-value, is a material part of the object. “A man or a commodity is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable.” This is because a pearl or a diamond is exchangeable. Though he agrees with the classical economists when they assert that value necessarily implies exchange, Marx chafes at the notion that value is an inherent part of the object. “No chemist,” he argues, “has discovered exchange- value either in a pearl or a diamond.” For Marx, this chemical substance called exchange-value has not been found because it does not exist. More precisely, Marx facetiously places this discovery in an unachievable future without having considered the conditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those conditions are precisely the fact of the commodity’s speech, which Marx dismisses in his critique of the very idea. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond” because pearls or diamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical substance of the object’s (exchange-)value is the fact—the material, graphic, phonic substance—of the object’s speech. Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but the object’s speech, the commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the final refutation of whatever the commodity will have said. Marx argues that the classical economists believe “that the usevalue of material objects belongs to them independently of their material properties.” He further asserts that they are confined in this view by the nonsocial realization of use- value—the fact that its realization does not come by way of exchange. When he makes these assertions, Marx moves in an already well- established choreography of approach and withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass already recited: the (exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange. Moreover, it exists precisely as the capacity for exchange and the capacity for a literary, performative, phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility comes by a nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is given as a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity. To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that is prior to exchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchange’s condition of possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery, of coming upon, of invention. The discovery of the chemical substance that is produced in and by Marx’s counterfactual is the achievement of Douglass’s line given in and as the theory and practice of everyday life where the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all the time. It is an achievement we’ll see given in the primal scene of Aunt Hester’s objection to exchange, an achievement given in speech, literary phonography, and their disruption. What is sounded through Douglass is a theory of value—an objective and objectional, productive and reproductive ontology—whose primitive axiom is that commodities speak. The impossible example is given in order to avoid anticipation, but it works to establish the impossibility of such avoidance. Indeed, the example, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath and sound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as our access to it is made possible only by way of recordings. We move within a series of phonographic anticipations, encrypted messages, sent and sending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect, without the necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation or foresight in Marx—an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive or anti- and anteimprovisation—is condition of possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding speech of the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of what could be thought here as his alternative modes of preparation make possible a whole other experience of the music of the event of the object’s speech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent tracks, modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity who speaks, in speaking, in the sound— the inspirited materiality—of that speech, constitutes a kind of temporal warp that disrupts and augments not only Marx but the mode of subjectivity that the ultimate object of his critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All of this moves toward the secret Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes. Such aurality is, in fact, what Marx called the “sensuous outburst of [our] essential activity.”10 It is a passion wherein “the senses have . . . become theoreticians in their immediate practice.”11 The commodity whose speech sounds embodies the critique of value, of private property, of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of ) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be known as human. In the meantime, every approach to Marx’s example must move through the ongoing event that anticipates it, the real event of the commodity’s speech, itself broken by the irreducible materiality —the broken and irreducible maternity—of the commodity’s scream. Imagine a recording of the (real) example that anticipates the (impossible) example; imagine that recording as the graphic reproduction of a scene of instruction, one always already cut by its own repression; imagine what cuts and anticipates Marx, remembering that the object resists, the commodity shrieks, the audience participates. Then you can say that Marx is prodigal; that in his very formulations regarding Man’s arrival at his essence, he has yet to come to himself, to come upon himself, to invent himself anew. This nonarrival is at least in part an ongoing concealment internal to a project structured by an attunement to the revealed secret. What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or in terms of race or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form, and reify. But we can also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudescence of an already existing notion of the private (or, more properly, of the proper) that operates within the constellation of self-possession, capacity, subjectivity, and speech. He can point to but not be communist. What does the dispropriative event have to do with communism? What’s the revolutionary force of the sensuality that emerges from the sonic event Marx subjunctively produces without sensually discovering? To ask this is to think what’s at stake in the music : the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performances. This is all meant to begin some thinking of the possibility that the Marxian formulation of sociality-inexchange is grounded in a notion of the proper that is disrupted by the essential impropriety of the (exchange-)value that precedes exchange. Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and matter that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marx’s counterfactual (“If the commodity could speak, it would say . . .”) is broken by a commodity and by the trace of a subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is something more here than alienation and fetishization that works, with regard to Marx, as a prefigurative critique. However, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of Marx’s analytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor iconic, not reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of phonic substance. FOR THE 1AC – The slave as the commodity that speaks disrupts the valuation of science and grammar, disarticulates the distinction between subject and object, spirit and matter and in doing so anticipates another possible future, a new science or theory of value that remakes the world.
Moten 2003 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 14]
The value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech — its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that it is not intrinsic—that Marx assigns it. The speaking commodity thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside; here what is given inside is that which is out-from- the-outside, a spirit manifest in its material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech is degraded, say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it is degraded by a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that “the [scarred] spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax.” These material degradations—fissures or invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism—are black performances. There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. It moves by way of the (phono- photo-porno-)graphic disruption the shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the primal. If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate response to passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it is more than another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriation—the deconstruction and reconstruction, the improvisational recording and revaluation—of value, of the theory of value, of the theories of value.13 It’s the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of the birth and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s). It’s the offset and rewrite, the phonic irruption and rewind, of my last letter, my last record date, my first winter, casting of effect and affect in the widest possible angle of dispersion.
1AC – Mother as material. The black man is the only American community of males that has had to learn of the female within himself. (Because of the ungendering of the black body) Black performance reclaims…. Moten 2003 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 15-6]
It is important to emphasize that the object’s resistance is, among other things, a rupture of two circles, the familial and the hermeneutic. The protocols of this investigation demand the consideration of that resistance as we’ll see Douglass both describe and transmit it. More precisely, we must be attuned to the transmission of the very materiality that is being described while noting the relay between material phonography and material substitution. Impossible, substitutive motherhood is the location of Aunt Hester, a location discovered, if not produced, in Hortense Spillers’s improvisational audition of sighting, non-sight, seen; of the heretofore unheard and overlooked (overseen) at the heart of the spectacle. Spillers explains what Douglass brings in his prefigurative disruption of and irruption into a fraternal science of value that emerges in a “social climate” in which motherhood is not perceived “as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance”:
The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handled by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historical development— the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent—takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women’s community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated— the law of the Mother—only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law. Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the “power” of “yes” to the “female” within.14
Listen to the echo of Douglass’s performative reproduction of a performance inextricably bound to his attempts to repress the learning that Spillers describes. But note that this attenuated covering of the maternal mark in Douglass is itself part and parcel of a kind of counterinscription before the fact, a prefigurative rematerialization constitutive of his recitation that returns as an expansive, audiovisual discourse on music. Meanwhile, note the indistinctness of the conditions of “mother” and “enslavement” in the milieu from which Douglass emerges and which he describes and narrates. This is to say that enslavement—and the resistance to enslavement that is the performative essence of blackness (or, perhaps less controversially, the essence of black performance) is a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material. But it is also to say something more. And here, the issue of reproduction (the “natural” production of natural children) emerges right on time as it has to do not only with the question concerning slavery, blackness, performance, and the ensemble of their ontologies but also with a contradiction at the heart of the question of value in its relation to personhood that could be said to come into clearer focus against the backdrop of the ensemble of motherhood, blackness, and the bridge between slavery and freedom. AT: Cap – Not Underlined. Contemporary Analyses of Capitalism always contain within themselves a disavowal of the slave that serves as the condition of possibility of a theory of value
Moten 2003 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 16-7]
Leopoldina Fortunati puts it this way: “The conflicting presence of value and nonvalue contained within individuals themselves obviously creates a specific and unresolvable contradiction.”15 She is speaking of a certain dematerialization that marks the transition from precapitalist to capitalist production and that works analogously to a dematerializ- ing operation animating the movement from slave labor to “free” labor. These transitions are both characterized by the commodity, [as] exchange value, taking precedence over the-individual- as-use- value, despite the fact that the individual is still the only source of the creation of value. For it is only by re-defining the individual as non-value, or rather as pure use-value, that capital can succeed in creat- ing labor power as “a commodity,” i.e. an exchange value. But the “value- lessness” of free workers is not only a consequence of the new mode of production, it is also one of the preconditions, since capital cannot become a social relation other than in relation to the individuals who, divested of all value, are thus forced to sell the only commodity they have, their labor power. Secondly, under capitalism, reproduction is separated off from produc- tion; the former unity that existed between the production of use-values and the reproduction of individuals within precapitalist modes of pro- duction has disappeared, and now the general process of commodity production appears as being separated from, and even in direct opposi- tion to, the process of reproduction. While the first appears as the creation of value, the second, reproduction, appears as the creation of non-value. Commodity production is thus posited as the fundamental point of capitalist production, and the laws that govern it as the laws that charac- terize capitalism itself. Reproduction now becomes posited as “natural” production.16
Fortunati joins Marx in a minute but crucial declension from use- value to nonvalue. The individual, enslaved laborer is characterized as use- value that, in the field of capitalist production, is equivalent to no-value, which is to say operative outside of exchange. But if this theoretical placement of the enslaved laborer outside of the field of exchange positions her as noncommodity, it does so not by way of some rigorous accounting but rather as a function of not hearing, of overlooking. This is despite the inescapable fact of the traffic in slaves. And because neither Marx nor Fortunati is able fully to think the articulation of slave and commodity, they both underestimate the commodity’s powers, for instance, the power to speak and to break speech. And yet, Fortunati, in her analysis of reproduction and in her submission of Marxian cate- gories to the corrective of feminist theory, sees, along with and ahead of Marx, that the individual contains value and nonvalue, that the commodity is contained within the individual. This presence of the commodity within the individual is an effect of reproduction, a trace of maternity. Of equal importance is the containment of a certain personhood within the commodity that can be seen as the commodity’s animation by the material trace of the maternal—a palpable hit or touch, a bodily and visible phonographic inscription. In the end, what I’m interested in is precisely that transference, a carrying or crossing over, that takes place on the bridge of lost matter, lost maternity, lost mechanics that joins bondage and freedom, that interinanimates the body and its ephemeral if productive force, that interarticulates the performance and the reproductive reproduction it always already contains and which contains it. This interest is, in turn, not in the interest of a nostalgic and impossible suturing of wounded kinship but is rather directed toward what this irrepressibly inscriptive, reproductive, and resistant material objecthood does for and might still do to the exclusionary brotherhoods of criticism and black radicalism as experimental black performance. This is to say that this book is an attempt to describe the material reproductivity of black performance and to claim for this reproductivity the status of an ontological condition. This is the story of how apparent nonvalue functions as a creator of value; it is also the story of how value animates what appears as nonvalue. This function- ing and this animation are material. This animateriality—impassioned response to passionate utterance—is painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere in the tracks of black performance and black discourse on black performance. It is both for and before Marx in ways delineated by Cedric Robinson’s historical analysis of “the making of the black radical tradition.” This book is meant to contribute both to the aesthetic genealogy of that line and to the invagination of the onto- logical totality whose preservation, according to Robinson, inspires a tradition whose birth is characterized by an ancient pre-maturity.17
Long ass untagged card about the screamand the reproductive and anticaptory qualities of black performance as black radicality.
Moten 2003 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 16-7]
Here, then, is one such disclosure, famously and infamously made by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative. By way of a set of resonant nodal points along the massive trajectory it extends, I want to think about this disclosure as an unavoidable anticipation, the preWgurative response to an epochal counterfactual, the always already belated origin of the music that ought to be understood as the rigorously sounded cri- tique of the theory of value. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped the longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood- clotted cowskin. I remember the Wrst time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the Wrst of a long series of such out- rages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terri- ble spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. . . . Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offense. Had he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought inter- ested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who know him will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for the infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the Xoor. I was so terriWed and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen anything like it before. . . .18
Now consider that passage’s relation to an almost equally well-known one that closely follows it:
The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves, were peculiarly enthusi- astic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would sing most exultingly the following words:—
“I am going away to the Great House Farm! Oh, yea! O, yea! O!”
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to them- selves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and Wlled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afXicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my Wrst glimmering con- ception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathy for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him in silence analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul;—and if he is not impressed, it will only be because “there is no Xesh in his obdurate heart.”19
What does it mean to move in the tradition of these passages, a tradi- tion of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embed- ded in passionate utterance and response? Passionate utterance and response together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negative positioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, is shaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question. In this sense utterance and response, seen together as encounter, form a kind of call wherein Hester’s shrieks improvise both speech and writing. What they echo and initiate in their response to the oaths—that must be heard as the passionate utterance or call—of the master helps to constitute a questioning, musical encounter. Having been called by call and response back to music, let’s prepare our descent: let the call of call and response, passionate utterance and response—articulated in the scene Douglass identiWes as “the blood- stained gate” through which he entered into subjection and subjectiv- ity; articulated, more precisely, in the phonography of the very screams that open the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom—operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or musicked word improvised through the opposition of speech and writing before the deWnition of rhythm and melody). Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositional encounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performative, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones.
In the long advent of a movement called “free jazz”—a beginning as long as the tradition it extends—Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr. collaborated in making a recording/performance called “Protest.” Lincoln hums and then screams over Roach’s increasingly and insistently intense percussion, moving inexorably in a trajectory and toward a location that is remote from—if not in excess of or inaccessible to—words. You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream as it bears, at the moment of articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagi- nation constantly reconstituting the whole of the voice, the whole of the story, redoubled and intensiWed by the mediation of years, recita- tions, auditions. That echo haunts, say, Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or the fractured, fracturing climax of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” It’s the re-en-gendering haint of an old negation: Ayler always screaming secretly to the very idea of mastery, “It’s not about you”; Brown paying the price of such negation, a terrible, ecstatic, possessive, dispossessive inability to stop singing; both performing historical placement as a long transfer, a transcendental fade, an interminable songlike drag disrupting song. The revolution embedded in such duration is, for a moment, a run of questions: What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object? What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What is the beautiful? What will blackness be?20 Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impos- sible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent. That place— locus of an ongoingly other recording of event, object, music—is Abbey Lincoln’s narrative. This is a recording, an improvisation, of her words, troubled by the trace of the performance of which she tells and the performance of which that performance told. I was born the tenth of twelve children . . . /I visited a psychiatric hospi- tal ’cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t him, so I Wgured it must be me / They had me hollering and screaming like a crazy person; I ain’t hollering and screaming for my freedom. The women I come from will take something and knock you . . . /Monk whis- pered in my ear, “Don’t be so perfect.” He meant make a mistake; reach for something/I didn’t think a scream was part of the music/We were rid- ing in the car with my nephew who was eight years old and who said, “The reason I can scream louder than Aunt Abbey is ’cause I’m a little boy/ Went all over the world hollering and screaming; it increased my depth as an actress and a singer/I didn’t write it, I didn’t conceive it; I’m just the singer on it /I got rid of a taboo and screamed in everybody’s face/ We had to go to court; somebody thought Roach was killing me in the studio/My instrument is deepening and widening; it’s because I’m possessed of the spirit / I learned it from my mother—the preacher, that’s what they called her /Betty Carter: we came to the stage about the same time; it was a great surprise when she died; she was a year older than me and I’ve been feeling frail ever since . . . It’s easy for me to cry; I’m an actress /You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz / When Bird was around he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed of my own spirit /This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ’cause you could die like an animal down here.21
Lincoln demands another rethinking, of “Protest” along lines I only thought I knew, lines I never thought I knew. Her relation to Roach disturbingly and rightly echoes Hester’s relation to the master and to Douglass. Roach’s double identiWcation and desire link him to Douglass and are all bound up with Lincoln’s political, musical, and intellectual lingering in a quite speciWc and brutal kind of horror as Roach’s object, accessing and performing, recording, that history, moving in the double- ness of possession, the sexuality of spirituality and the anoriginality of black performances. Not the reduction of but the reduction to phonic materiality where re-en-gendering prefaces and works itself. No origi- nary conWguration of attributes but an ongoing shiftiness, a living labor of engendering to be organized in its relation to a politico-aesthesis. It’s always going on and has been. Abbey Lincoln starts, in classic (anti-, ante-[slave]) narrative fashion. That black radicalism cannot be under- stood within the particular context of its genesis is true; it cannot be understood outside that context either. In this sense, black radicalism is (like) black music. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way of listening to the music). So we move with but also out and outside of Douglass’s repressive, annular attunement to the secret, the audio-visual materiality of a maternal substitution, identiWcation, and cathexis that he tries to forget, the ongoing re-entry into a vexed self-knowledge that he covers by entering into a discourse on music. Douglass (and, by extension, Roach and Brown and the entire line of mastery’s disruptive, oppositional, anoriginal recording) was already sexually cut and aug- mented, already anticipated and improvised, already re-en-gendered by the sound of the one who comes before him, the one we keep calling on to arrive again, here and now, so we can get to the content of the epigraph. Cannot redress slavery within the law Best and Hartman 2005 [Stephen and Saidiya, “Fugutive Justice,” Representations p. 1-2]
Cugoano isn’t at all confused here. A ‘‘just commutation’’ is not opposed to remedies ‘‘unjust.’’ Any remedy would have been welcome and deserved, for the slaves were certainly in need of remedy, it simply would not have exhausted their claims for ‘‘justice.’’ A ‘‘plan’’ for the redress of slavery is what is urgently needed, but any plan, any legal remedy, would inevitably be too narrow, and as such it would also prove necessarily inadequate. In his plan for the abolition of slavery and the reform of the three continents shaped by it, Cugoano operates within the governing logic of law and commerce; yet he recognizes that pragmatic solutions, which would be beneficial to the commerce and interests ofGreat Britain, fall far short of justice. He insists that the injury of slaverymust be borne, since it cannot be reversed. In his account, justice is beyond the scope of the law, and redress necessarily inadequate. If what has been done cannot be undone, then the forms of legal and social compensa- tion available are less a matter of wiping the slate clean than of embracing the lim- ited scope of the possible in face of the irreparable, and calling attention to the incommensurability between pain and compensation. How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restor- ing a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?
The interval between the need for legal remedy and the impossibility of redress is the site of fugitivity Best and Hartman 2005 [Stephen and Saidiya, “Fugutive Justice,” Representations p. 1-3]
In T houghts and Sentiments, Cugoano connects the possibilities of habitation to the act of lamentation —the enactment of black grief. Restitution for the crimes of slavery depends upon the expression of grief and the working through of the ‘‘melancholy instances,’’ which, like the stations of the cross, are tableaus of loss, suffering, and death that point toward redemption. As Veena Das notes, in the pro- cess of mourning, ‘‘the transactions between body and language lead to an articula- tion of the world in which the strangeness of the world revealed by death, by its non-inhabitability, can be transformed into a world in which one can dwell again, in full awareness of a life that has to be lived in loss.’’4 A life lived in loss—this perhaps is the great gift of Cugoano’s harsh words and laments, the recognition that abolition could not redress the crime of slavery but could only commute its death sentence. In this regard, he was perhaps more hopeful than Henry Highland Garnet, who believed slavery was a condition that was not terminated even by death, since the progeny of the enslaved inherited the wretched condition of their predecessors. Cugoano’s plan for reform entailed working through ‘‘the injuries already done’’ and operating within the limited scope of the possible, rather than making right a wrong, restoring what has been destroyed, or giving back what has been taken. By 1787, it had already become too late for that. What we find of interest in Cugoano’s text is its nuanced conceptualization of redress discourse, a sophisticated understanding captured in the rhetorical distinc- tions between grievance and grief; between the necessity of legal remedy and the impossibility of redress (‘‘these could not avail’’); between the unavoidable form of the ‘‘appeal’’ and its ultimate illegibility and insufficiency (it ‘‘can only be . . . known to the ears of Jehovah’’); between the complaint that is audible to ‘‘noble Britons’’ and the extralinguistic mode of black noise that exists outside the parame- ters of any strategy or plan for remedy. We find in this loophole between hope and resignation (Cugoano’s differend )a deeper significance, a sign of the political interval in which all captives find themselves—the interval between the no longer and the not yet, between the destruction of the old world and the awaited hour of deliver- ance. That interval is the hour of the captive’s redemption, it is not only the govern- ing trope of the captive’s complaint but also, viewed from the retrospective glance of our political present, the master trope of black political discourse.5 In this interval we find the mutual imbrication of pragmatic political advance with a long history of failure; in it, too, we find a representation in miniature of fugitive justice.
AT: Cap – Marx can’t think white supremacy – undercuts alternative revolutionary strategies Wilderson 2005 [Frank B., “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society?” p 1]
First, the Black American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. Secondly, the Black subject reveals marxism's inability to think White supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question marxism's claim to elaborate a comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, “decisive” antagonism. Stated another way: Gramscian marxism is able to imagine the subject which transforms her/himself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations which can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and/or hegemony, but it is asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and/or terror. Finally, we begin to see how marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety: a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis -- a society which does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the approach of variable capital: in other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help keep in place, insure the coherence of, Reformation and Enlightenment “foundational” values of productivity and progress. This is a crowding-out scenario for other postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e. idleness.
AT: Cap and Structural Antagonism – the Insatiability of the Slave Wilderson 2005 [Frank B., “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society?” p 1] Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent. This phenomenon is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is two-fold: First, “the socio-political order of the New World” (Spillers 1987: 67) was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a Black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a White body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery—the “accumulation” of Black bodies regardless of their utility as laborers (Hartman; Johnson) through an idiom of despotic power (Patterson)—is closer to capital's primal desire than is waged oppression—the “exploitation” of unraced bodies (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci) that labor through an idiom of rational/symbolic (the wage) power: A relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony.3 Secondly, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, direct relations of force (the prison industrial complex), the despotism of the unwaged relation: and this Renaissance of slavery has, once again, as its structuring image in libidinal economy, and its primary target in political economy, the Black body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subject’s potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late- capital's over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure marxist conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If, by way of the Black subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it mean to be free? that grammar being the question What does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous terror of White supremacy is as much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a logic—the logic of capital. It extends beyond texualization. When talking about this terror, Cornel West uses the term “black invisibility and namelessness” to designate, at the level of ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes:
[America's] unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental condition of black culture -- that of black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and selfannihilation. This is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. (80-81)
Thus, the Black subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand that can not be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing rubrics; whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can indeed be satisfied by way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the question, What does it mean to suffer? And that grammar is organized around the categories of exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery). Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the only category of oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of the Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again, this is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy "racism" and articulate it as a derivative phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself. What I am saying is that the insatiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)—the Black body can not give its consent because “generalized trust,” the precondition for the solicitation of consent, “equals racialized whiteness” (Lindon Barrett). Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange: a slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct relations of force, which is to say that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. White supremacy’s despotic irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as capitalism’s symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it… … dictates the limits of the operation of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital to its sustenance. Hence black subordination constitutes the necessary condition for the flourishing of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what Richard Wright meant when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor." (72)
And it is well known that a metaphor comes into being through a violence which kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept might live. West's interventions help us see how marxism can only come to grips with America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot come to grips with America's structuring irrationality: the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its hyper-discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society, may live. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life. This is important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying—at some point they require coherence, they require categories for the record—which means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness.
Structural Antagonism Wilderson 2005 [Frank B., “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society?” p 1]
Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject's positionality. The Black American subject does not generate Historical categories of Entitlement, Sovereignty, and/or Immigration for the record. We are off the record. To the data generating demands of the Historical axis we present a virtual blank, much like the KhoiSan's virtual blank presented to the data generating demands of the Anthropological axis. The work of Hortense Spillers on Black female sexuality corroborates these findings. Spillers’ conclusions, regarding the Black female subject and the discourse of sexuality are in tandem with ours regarding the Black ungendered subject and the question of hegemony and, in addition, unveil the ontological elements which Black women and men share: a scandal in the face of New World hegemony. [T]he black female [is] the veritable nemesis of degree and difference [emphasis mine]. Having encountered what they understand as chaos, the empowered need not name further, since chaos is sufficient naming within itself. I am not addressing the black female in her historical apprenticeship as inferior being, but, rather, the paradox of non-being [emphasis mine]. Under the sign of this particular historical order, black female and black male are absolutely equal. (Spillers “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” 77) In the socio-political order of the New World the Black body is a “captive body” marked and branded from one generation to the next (Ibid). A body on which… …any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions [is lost]. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification [emphasis mine], as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory (68). The gratuitous violence begun in slavery, hand in hand with the absence of data for the New World Historical Axis (Rights/Entitlement, Sovereignty, Immigration) as a result of slavery, position Black subjects in excess of Gramsci’s fundamental categories, i.e. labor, exploitation, historical selfawareness; for these processes of subjectification are assumed by those with a semiotics of analogy already in hand—the currency of exchange through which “a dimension…of relatedness between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions” can be established. Thus, the Black subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic of Gramscian discourse. S/he implies a scandal: “total objectification” in contradistinction to human possibility, however slim, as in the case of working class hegemony, that human possibility appears. t is this scandal which places Black subjectivity in a structurally impossible position, outside of the "natural" articulations of hegemony; but it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because our presence works back upon the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject—even the most massacred subjects, Indians—are required to have analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and one very large significant subject, the subject upon which the nation's drama of value is built, is a subject whose experience is without analog then, by that subject's very presence all other analogs are destabilized. Lest we think of the Black body as captive only until the mid 19th century, Spillers reminds us that the marking and branding, the total objectification are as much a part of the present as they were of the past. Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. (1987: 68) Herein, the concept of civil war takes on a comprehensive and structural, as opposed to merely eventful, connotation.